


Apocrypha of the Inquisition

by Riptide



Series: Sanguinarius Sanctus [8]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Smut, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Angst, Morrigan's Daughter AU, Oral Sex, Penis In Vagina Sex, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2018-06-05 05:37:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6691747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riptide/pseuds/Riptide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a collection of short stories that fall within or around An Accounting of the Inquisition, but do not fit in the narrative style of that story; as such, they are (largely) not written by Cassandra, either because she was ignorant of the events herein or because she would not have included these details in a historical account.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coffee_maker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffee_maker/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a single night of passion in Halamshiral, Varric isn't sure where he stands with the Seeker. Shortly after they arrive back in Skyhold, though, he starts to get a decent idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains quite explicit material, so it's definitely NSFW. 
> 
> This first chapter is a gift to coffee_maker, and to myself, since it's been a loooong time since I've flexed my smut-writing muscles. I hope you enjoy it!

The wax softened just enough from the warmth of his hand that he could twist the the cork free without any wax dripping into the inkpot. Not that there was any doubt, of course---he'd opened more inkpots in his day than most chanters, though his ink was almost always spilt for far less holy purposes than copying the Chant of Light. Not that he didn't think, in the privacy of his mind, that Andraste would mind reading something new every once in awhile. Maybe even the piece of shit he was working on now. If _she_ of all people was a fan…

That thought took him through the first couple of sentences of the next chapter, the one he never thought he'd write. The one she hadn't needed to ask for. It really was _terrible_ , just about the worst thing he'd seen in print---at least until the mountebank he'd once called a friend had tried to rip him off, anyway---but _she_ seemed to like it. And now the two of them were...whatever the two of them were. Friends, certainly. Lovers? He wasn't sure, after just a single night in an Orlesian palace, but he wanted to find out. The only problem was that he'd written himself into a corner, which was one reason---on top of the serial’s dismal reception outside of a certain tight-lipped fan---that he'd shelved the whole thing for nearly five years. But he had incentive now, even if the doggerel wouldn't wind up paying for its own ink.

With a sigh, he dipped his quill and put it back to parchment. He was halfway into the next sentence when a single, sharp _rap_ came through his door, shortly thereafter followed by the Inquisitor herself. He moved to stand, his heart warmed by the small smile on her face, but she shook her head. “Keep writing,” she implored him, the curve of her lips rooting him to his chair. “Please.”

Well, he couldn't say no to _that_ , now could he? “Alright,” he acceded, turning back to his parchment. He tried to scratch out a few more lines, keenly aware of the Inquisitor's presence as she moved about his room. She didn't touch anything, at least not that he could hear, but she walked casually over his dusty floorboards without bothering to silence her steps. He didn't want to read too much into that, but he liked to think it meant she felt safe, here.

At least until she stopped abruptly and cleared her throat. “Do my eyes deceive me, or does your window truly let out over the practice yard?”

Suddenly _he_ didn't feel entirely safe, but he _did_ feel an odd heat creeping beneath his stubble. “Maybe,” he admitted, not turning to face her. “What of it?”

“I simply find it difficult to accept such a thing is mere coincidence,” she told him, from much closer; he hadn't heard her stepping that time, but she lay her hands upon his shoulders, confirming her proximity. He was caught between the instinct to flinch and the desire to lean back into that touch, which combined to thread tension through his shoulders. “Keep writing,” she intoned, her voice much less a plea than a command, then.

He couldn't do much more than put his pen back to the parchment, and after a few more lines, the Inquisitor began to dig into his muscles with her hands. He sighed as those strong fingers carved into the meat of his shoulders through the roughspun fabric of his tunic, cleaving the tension from his bones as though it were flesh and she a master butcher. Then, just as the last traces of that tension melted away, the nature of her touch changed; her fingers slipped beneath the neckline of his tunic, but their contact became light as a feather. His breath caught, and his quill stopped its waltz across the page. “ _Seeker_ ,” he breathed, half a plea and half a warning. “If you want me to keep writing, you've got a funny way of showing it. Of course, if you're interested in other things…”

A soft breath of laughter tickled over his ear. “Put the pen down, dwarf,” she told him, and again he found he couldn’t keep himself from complying. Those fingers kept playing lightly over his flesh; her index and middle fingers just grazed the coarse hairs of his chest beneath his collarbones, while her thumbs sought the hollows at the base of his neck, hovering so close that he could only feel contact with each beat of his heart. “Tell me it was coincidence that had you choose this room,” she breathed, her breath hot against his earlobe. “Lie to me, Varric.”

Instinct told him not to move, not to act, as an altogether different sort of tension raced along his nerves, driven on in waves by her feathery touches. “No can do,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “I...don’t ever want to lie to you again, if I can help it.”

“Good,” she told him, her voice thickening, every bit the conquering hero he’d learnt her to be, in the long months since their first acquaintance. She rewarded his honesty by sliding her hands more firmly down his chest, and he rolled his shoulders as he leaned back, instinctively easing her access.

The movement also made him realise just how uncomfortably _tight_ his trousers had become in the last couple of minutes, and he stifled a groan. He still had enough blood left above the waist not to beg her to move any faster, but holding the demand in took more effort than he would have imagined. “You know, I’ve never been a morning person,” he gruffed, chancing a tilt of his head, just enough to catch sight of her cheek and eye from the corner of his own.

He saw a twinkle in her eye, and the scar on her cheek---not the long gash of her left, but the shorter stitch of the right---dimpled with her knowing smirk. “I suppose my pre-dawn exercises must have awakened you more than once, by and by,” she mused.

“They might’ve,” he admitted, closing his eyes again as one of her fingers found his nipple, her fingernail catching on the ring. “But it was worth it, seeing you work as the sun came up.”

“Really?” She sounded much less impressed than skeptical, punctuating her point by dragging that fingernail over the nub of his nipple _just_ hard enough to drag a stuttered gasp out of him.

“...Really,” he reiterated, when he’d caught his breath, and he managed to look her in the eye again.

“But you see me _work_ quite often,” she remarked, leaning in closer. Her left hand palmed down his abdomen as her right continued to play at his nipple, which had stiffened, caught as it was between the gold and her fingertip. “It has never seemed to distract you before.”

Varric’s mouth worked without making a coherent sound for a moment as his body arched, trying to bring her hand lower, but her fingers only curled and drew up past his navel. She arched a brow, clicking her tongue. “Since you are being honest with me, I want you to tell me why you watch me at my practise,” she demanded, shifting so that he could see her face more fully, even as it moved further away.

The muscles of her arm strained his shirt, but he didn’t move with the pressure, uncertain he could hold himself back from a kiss---and even less certain how an attempt at such would be received. “At first?” He wondered, licking his lips and willing his cock to stop begging _quite_ so hard for attention, at least long enough for him to think. “I just wanted some material for a book.” At her look of surprised disbelief he chuckled, allowing himself a cocksure smirk. “Funnily enough, when we’re fighting for real, I don’t let myself get distracted because I’m too busy trying to keep you and Harry alive. You give B---... _my crossbow_ quite a workout, charging into every second bear cave we come across.” At his near-mention of Bianca’s name he’d seen her flinch, felt a more brittle twitch in her arms, and his clever tongue had changed tracks without even thinking. He didn’t know if that was good, or if it was really, really bad.

But when he felt her relax, saw the shadow pass from her eyes and her lips turn up at the edges, he found he didn’t much care.

“I suppose I would rather you paid attention to our foes on the field,” she conceded, before she shifted again, extricating her arms from beneath his tunic. At his slight, yearning sigh, she breathed a chuckle, stepping to his side and arching her back until it _popped_. “Remove the shirt,” she instructed, “and continue. What kept you from moving and enjoying a less cacophonous morning rise?”

He pushed his chair back just enough to yank his tunic up and over his head, careful as always of the rings in his nipples and his ears---a few glib mistakes in his misspent youth had taught him the price of _that_ folly. But when the cloth was so much woven flax on the floor he settled back in his chair, sipping deeply of some of those memories, grateful that long nights spent writing by candlelight hadn’t dimmed his eyes over the years. “Oh, I kept finding excuses to stay,” he said, gesturing to the bed and the desk. “I got used to my creature comforts here and didn’t feel like moving them...and I’ve gotta admit that the sunrise from this angle started growing on me, too.”

He took the chance and let his eyes wander. The Seeker wore simple clothes on those rare occasions when she wasn’t fighting or practicing---or trying unsuccessfully to fit into Orlesian high society. But he’d seen every inch of her beneath her own roughspun, all the muscles beneath her flesh and the scars cut into it, each thread even more captivating than he’d imagined. And he’d imagined it quite often, if he was still being honest. When his eyes made it back up to her face, he saw a hint of a blush along her cheeks that brought his grin back. “I might have, ahh, indulged in some...wishful thinking, a time or two.”

That got her blush to intensify for a heartbeat before she raised a brow. “You may be the oddest dwarf I have ever met, Varric.”

He gruffed a laugh. _You’ve never met my brother_ , he almost said, but his tongue leapt to his rescue yet again by turning his words into “You may be the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen, Cassandra.” And that smile, that fucking _smile_ , half-embarrassed and half-incredulous and all authentic surprise, it lanced him low in his chest; the breathed guffaw and the averted eyes didn’t do his heart any favours, either, and for a second he forgot the yearning in his crotch that still had his trousers straining against their stitches.

Turned out he had it bad, and he didn’t care.

When the Seeker chewed through his compliment, though, her own smile faded as she regarded him appraisingly. “Are you saying that you... _manhandled_ yourself, while you watched me?”

That sinking feeling in his chest dropped down into the pit of his stomach, and he swallowed. “Uhhh,” he grunted, lifting his hands in what he hoped to Andraste was a placating gesture. “I mean, I didn’t do it _while_ I was watching you.” No, that’d’ve been too risky. “It was usually just after.” He swallowed, hard, grateful that a bit of blood was returning to his head, even if it left a more forlorn ache between his legs as his erection began to flag.

At least it flagged until he saw the Seeker’s tongue sweep out absentmindedly over her bottom lip, and he felt her own eyes grace his exposed abdomen with appreciation. “I do not know why I continue to be surprised by how often you manage to surprise me, dwarf,” she mused, moving to stand between his chair and his desk, so that his knees nearly brushed her shins. “But I do not think it fair that those fingers of yours have brought you so much pleasure at the thought of me, while I have been left wanting.”

All that blood came rushing back down into his cock, and he absentmindedly reached for the laces of his trousers, to relieve the tension if for no other reason, but the Seeker's gaze sharpened into something like a glare. “It was your fingers that caused the disparity,” she reminded him. “It should be they that remedy it, don't you think?”

Those traitorous digits halted their work on his laces and he nodded, unable to think of a decent counter argument. “When you put it that way…” And then he leaned forward a bit, his hands moving to her thighs, but they hesitated before making contact; he looked up her still-clothed torso, into her face. She watched him thoughtfully, her features framed by candlelight. “May I begin to redress the balance, my lady Seeker?”

A strange shadow fell over her eyes, just for an instant, just for a _heartbeat_ , and he thought she might come to her senses---or, worse, that he might wake up. But then the heartbeat passed, and the shadow lifted. “You may, my lord dwarf.”

The dwarf’s hands closed the gap to her thighs after another heartbeat, his eyes watchful of her expression as his fingers tested the flesh of her still-clothed thighs. He saw her expression tighten with want, and that was all the encouragement his fingers needed to roam further afield---the digits worked down to her knees, subtly inching her legs apart until she leaned her weight onto the desk. He sat forward in his chair, sliding his palms up the front of her legs, his thumbs pressing against the insides of her thighs, very nearly reaching her core before his hands shifted to slip beneath the hem of her tunic.

He lifted the fabric until the planes of her abdomen glowed in the light of his candles, and only then did he tear his eyes from the Seeker's face, his gaze moving to devour the newly-exposed inches. An understated scar caught his eye, just beneath her navel, near where her trousers were laced. He could imagine the split second reaction which must have saved her, the hair's breath that had likely meant the difference between this little keepsake and something much less adorable. Unable to suppress a shudder, Varric pressed a bristled kiss to the rough patch of skin, thankful that the injury had been so mild, even as he wished he could have prevented it, whenever it might’ve happened.

“You do not have to be so tentative,” the Seeker told him, her tone undercut with an impatience driven by a yearning that helped distract the dwarf from such tender thoughts.

“As you wish,” Varric supplied, chuckling at his complete lack of surprise that out of the two of them, _he_ was the big softie. Spurred by her words---and much else, besides---he lanced his thumbs down her belly, slipping them between her flesh and her trousers as he moved to loosen her laces with his teeth. Just like Darryk Hander would’ve done, were he in a similar situation with Captain Evelynn Valiant. Except Darryk Hander wouldn’t have got the hemp stuck in his front teeth, and he _certainly_ wouldn’t have drawn back quickly, knotting the blasted string even tighter around his lover’s waist.

Varric Tethras, it turned out, was no Darryk Hander.

It was _almost_ worth the irritation of having to untangle rope from his own teeth to hear the Seeker’s throaty laugh. “I suppose that is one thing we can write up to the author’s fancy,” she mused, grazing the dwarf’s cheek with the back of her knuckles for a moment before she bent, retrieving a dagger from her boot. Because _of course_ the Seeker would carry a dagger---to trim her nails, if for no other reason. With it she made short work of parting the knot that Varric’s foolishness had bunched her laces into, and she lay the stiletto onto the desk just before she eased back to lean against it again. “Now, I believe you were on a certain course,” she reminded him with an arched brow. “Unless you’ve become too...distracted?”

If Varric’s cock had softened even the tiniest bit during his failed attempt at clever gallantry, it returned to full attention under the Seeker’s expectant gaze. He swallowed, ignoring the lingering taste of his failure, and he needed no further coaxing to pick up where he’d left off. He pulled those troublesome trousers of hers down, over her thighs and past her knees, only stopping to praise Andraste when he realised she wasn’t wearing a single stitch of smallclothes beneath them.

He felt the raw power held in her legs as his palms glided up them, nothing now between his fingers and her flesh. He could easily envision these thighs wrenching a shoulder from its socket---had seen such, even, when a fight in the Western Approach had taken a surprising turn. Yet, for all her strength, the Seeker drank in his touch, allowing her legs to fall open in unmistakable invitation. A large part of him wanted to lunge forward, to devour her from her core as though he were starving, but he held himself back from that abandon, both to build up the tension and because she’d specifically suggested his _fingers_ do the remedying. To that end, he drew his right thumb along the juncture of her hip and thigh, and he sent his left hand roaming the expanse of her abdomen, still cloaked from his view by her tunic.

She gripped the edge of the desk to either side of her legs, her breath catching audibly as his thumb traversed the furred flesh of her outer lips. She rolled her hips into his touch, hissing again. “I told you that you need not be so timid,” she reminded him, and he could tell by the heat coming from her centre that she was at least as eager as he was.

“Come now, Seeker,” he said, his voice dipping into a growl as he looked up at her from beneath his eyebrows, his thumb just beginning to weave between those outer lips to tease at the slicker flesh between them. “Surely a warrior of your stature can tell the difference between being tentative or timid,” he allowed, moving his broad thumb to the apex of her inner lips and centring his index and middle fingers on the entrance of her cunt, applying just a touch of pressure as he spoke, “and being _thorough_.” At that last word he shifted his hand forward, only intending to slide his fingers halfway; the Seeker’s hips must’ve had other ideas, however, because they bucked forward to meet that initial thrust, until his digits hilted all the way up to the third knuckle.

He saw the pulse of pleasure lick out from her core in waves, and it looked so delicious that his upper hand began to slip down her belly, seemingly intent on relieving a bit of the tension currently penned in by his own trousers. Before the errant hand got too far, however, the Seeker grasped his wrist through the fabric of her tunic, the graceful ease of her thighs mirrored in the vise-like grip of her hand upon his wrist. “Don’t,” she told him, looking down at his face through heavy-lidded eyes, her hips still pressing forward against his knuckles. “Unless you wish to make no progress toward that balance, that is.”

 _There could be worse fates than never catching up_ , he thought, but just then his tongue was too thick in his mouth to form the words properly. Instead he grinned, sliding his captive hand farther up the Seeker’s torso until it anchored on her flank. His lower hand twisted until his palm faced up, his thumb lightly circling the nub of her clit, only brushing it around the edges. Still he held himself in check, his attention drawing to a point as he worked with the patience of an author long used to having to work for each word that came from his fingers. This wasn’t _quite_ like writing a novel, but the groans and plaintive cries his skill elicited from the Seeker were somehow more satisfying than any sack of royalties his words had ever earned him.

His fingers began working more earnestly, and the Seeker’s hips rolled just off-time with his thrusts, so that his digits never slipped further than the second knuckle before they slotted back into her core. Unable to hold himself back any further, the dwarf slid forward, easing off the edge of his chair to kneel in front of her. He brought his tongue to join his thumb in swirling about the nub nestled at the top of her cuntlips, and he couldn’t quite swallow the deep grunt of _want_ that her taste drew out of him.

Varric found a steely set of fingers forked through his hair, urging him on, and soon his thumb gave way to make room for his stubbled lips as well as his tongue. He didn't focus too much on her clit---he wasn't an _amateur---_ but each time he brought his tongue over the nub, he curled his fingers inside her so that his fingerpads brushed along the rough patch of flesh hidden deep within her walls. She cursed at him in Orlesian, which he spoke passably, and in Nevarran, which he didn't...though he gathered from what few words he understood that stopping would have cost him dearly.

A sharp _crack_ sounded, punctuating the Seeker’s up-tempo grunt, but Varric found he had no attention to spare as she writhed beneath his attentions; her walls squeezed his fingers so tightly that he felt an ache in his his knuckles, and his shoulders took the weight of her shins as her legs shifted to bring her core even closer to his mouth. He moved his left hand to the small of her back to help stabilise her as the tension crested, and he slowed his fingers, drawing out the moment, keeping her riding the edge of her release for as many heartbeats as he could manage. He knew she was _this close_ when her groans stopped---he could imagine well enough that her head fell back and her chest filled with air. He gave her nub one last, lingering lick before tilting his own back to look at her face, at her lips parting soundlessly as she breathed in, at the blood creeping up her neck and flushing the skin around her scars. The sight was enough to rob his own lungs of breath and twist the aching pressure between his legs. “That’s it,” he gruffed, working his thumb over the hood of her clit. “That’s it.”

On the second repetition, the Seeker broke open the sky with the force of her scream---her hips bucked violently, her walls clamping down so powerfully that his fingers had to retreat. He shifted as her release tore through her, easing her down onto her knees so that he could hold her close while the waves took hold. She collapsed into his embrace, her arms snaking around his shoulders and her face burrowing into his neck, and he kept her there, between the chair and the desk, until she caught her breath and stopped clinging to him so fiercely. “That was…” She drawled, her breath hot against the crook of his neck.

“Enough?” He probed, glancing at the shattered inkpot on the floor beside them, a mixture of pride and chagrin in his smirk.

The Seeker’s answer wasn’t immediate, but after a few breaths she straightened, rising on her knees until he had to look up at her. “Do you truly tire so quickly?” She mused, arching her brow. Her eyes tracked down his bare chest, settling on the swollen girth of his cock, still confined by his trousers. “Or...do you simply prefer to take matters into your own hands?”

The dwarf nearly choked on his laugh, and he moved to stand, levering himself onto his feet with his elbow on the chair behind him. It was his turn to look down on her for a change, and he took full advantage of the view. “I don’t think so,” he allowed, offering her a hand. “We wouldn’t want me to fall behind on that debt, would we?”

“Perish the thought,” she replied, gaining her feet---though she took the opportunity to step out of her boots, leaving her trousers in a pile on the floor. He stood rooted to the spot as she peeled herself out of her tunic, witnessing each chord of muscle and curve of flesh, hardly a hand’s breadth unbroken by a nick or mark of some kind, but each fascinating inch more irresistible than the last. Once the garment was discarded, however, the warrior didn’t stand to be admired; she stalked forward, a woman of purpose, laying a hand on his chest to guide him backward. He was too focused on her to do anything but trust her direction, so when his calves backed into the mattress, he fell back with a grunt of surprise. She stood over him then, as though allowing herself to bask in his attention for a brief moment at last, before she moved to straddle his thighs and bring her face close to his. “It appears you have me at a disadvantage,” she observed, letting her belly grind against his captive cock. When he rolled his eyes and bucked his hips into the contact, she breathed a laugh, brushing the lightest of kisses over his lips. “Or perhaps _you_ are the unfortunate one?”

Varric’s tongue was too thick to shape a reply, but when it became clear that the Seeker wouldn’t move a muscle to change the disparity in their respective states of dress, his fingers found their nerve; he made short work of the laces of his trousers and shimmied them down his hips, until his cock pressed freely against her belly. “Oh, fuck,” he growled, his hands moving to claim her taut flanks, applying a gentle pressure to encourage her to slide further up his torso.

Candlelight sparkled in her eyes, and she made a point of not moving for a few heartbeats. When she _did_ move, her hips rolled as her shoulders lifted up, so that his cock stayed pinned between them as her body shifted on top of him. She settled back with a sigh, her cunt resting heavily on the underside of his shaft, bathing his cock in her slick heat. She put her hands on his chest, her fingers weaving into the pelt that had broken a thousand hearts in Kirkwall, and she began to rock her hips back and forth in time with his breaths. “Oh, _fuck_ ,” he sighed, again, and his eyes nearly rolled when she gave him a full-throated laugh that he could feel reverberating from her very core.

“That is the idea, is it not?”

In lieu of a verbal reply, Varric’s hands reclaimed the Seeker’s hips, and he began rocking just off-time with her thrusts, much like she’d done with his fingers before. His chest prickled as her blunt nails began to test his flesh, and his breaths made it rise and fall more quickly; the pace of their hips began to synchronise, but in reverse, so that each thrust brought the tip of Varric’s shaft closer to her entrance before her cunt glided down its length. At last Varric’s hips rolled back and Cassandra angled hers _just so_ , and when the dwarf thrusted up, the broad head of his cock parted her walls, and she bucked with such force that the bed shook beneath them when her hips pinned him down. “ _Oh, fuck_ ,” he forced through his gritted teeth. “Cassandra…”

The name fell from his lips like a prayer, pretty much the closest he got these days. Her lips parted, but she did not speak, looking at him with heavy-lidded eyes. And when she began moving again, it was all he could do to keep his eyes open, to keep them fixed on her face rather than rolling back in his head from the sheer pleasure of her weight atop him. His hands moved from her hips to roam up her back, and she fell forward as he started meeting her thrusts with his own; her chest and collarbones were at the perfect level for his lips, and he blessed her flesh with licks and kisses far less gentle than the single one she’d given him. After a few more breaths, he felt an odd pressure mount in her thighs, and then suddenly they were rolling sideways until the Seeker was on her back and he was on top.

The change in perspective took hardly more than a heartbeat for him to get used to; instinctively he moved an arm to hook beneath her knee, using his leverage to tilt her hips up, which had the effect of shortening her torso and letting him claim her lips in a proper kiss for the first time tonight---and the first time since that weeks-distant rendezvous in Orlais. The new angle _also_ helped his shaft hit the sweet spot nestled deep atop the walls of her cunt, and each thrust gave him an even deeper groan to swallow while his tongue probed her mouth, sharing a bit of the nectar he’d gathered.

The Seeker’s eyes screwed shut as she fell into the kiss and bucked back against his thrusts, her hands fixing to his shoulderblades. Her breaths deepened with each roll of her hips, and soon she tore her mouth from his lips, gasping for air. “ _Varric_ ,” she hissed, as much a thick plea as it was a benediction.

The sound of his name coming from the Seeker in those tones struck a flint deep inside the dwarf, and even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t hold back the tension as it broke over him. His shaft swelled as his hips began bucking wildly, already too far gone to stop, when his release was spiked with the deep sting of her fingernails raking down his back. The pain swirled around the pleasure, his whole world narrowing to a point of light in a sea of darkness, and he was only distantly aware of the throaty scream that tore from the Seeker’s lungs.

When his focus widened and the crescendo of sensation ebbed to a dull ache between his legs---still punctuated by the stinging of his shoulderblades---the dwarf found himself laying on his side, his arms thrown loosely about the Seeker’s torso. She looked at him with a distant expression, tinged only at the edges with the pleasure that they’d shared. After several moments of silence broken only by the different cadence of their breathing, she licked her lips. “Do you believe that one can betray the dead?”

The question took him by surprise, and his thoughts were too muddled from their exertions to form a proper answer. “...I don’t think so,” he managed, after another few breaths. “Either they’re with the Maker, I guess, or they’re…”

“Gone,” she finished for him, frowning slightly. “But in either case, their memory lingers.”

“It always does,” Varric agreed, his hand moving to cup her cheek. “But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that memories don’t keep you warm, at least not by themselves.” He propped himself up on his elbow, grimacing only slightly at the echo of pain from his back, which he was too proud about having earned to complain over. “Cassandra,” he sighed, giving her a smile touched with a distance of his own. “Neither of us wanted to be here; if things’d gone our way, we probably never would’ve met. But...we can keep our memories, and still keep _this_.” His thumb teased over her bottom lip, and he felt his grin take fuller shape as her own smile firmed. “If you want to, that is.”

Cassandra took a steadying breath, and then she nuzzled into his hand, closing her eyes. “I think I would like that, Varric,” she admitted. “Yes...I’d like that very much.”


	2. The Once and Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Actions taken in the Arbor Wilds have an effect on the King of Ferelden, and lead him to make a discovery that may echo through Thedosian history for ages to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place in between the penultimate and final chapters of AAotI. Thanks yet again to coffee_maker for beta-reading!

 

 _The stench is familiar by now, charred rot and brimstone slaked with sweet copper and mouldered earth. It's haunted his dreams of late with more frequency, and even though he_ knows _he's dreaming, knows what parade of horrors awaits him trying to open his eyes, he still can't help the tickle of fear in the back of his throat-a tickle in his dream, likely a blood-churning scream in reality. When he_ does _try to wake himself, his dream-eyes open and he finds himself in the middle of Denerim as it was on the night of their victory over the archdemon; fire licks the walls of buildings like lovers, the burning streets overrun with monsters that don't know the first taste of pity. Unlike that far-past night, however, he's here in the hellscape of his dream without a whisper of an ally, and a horde of twisted fiends all singing seductively for him to_ join _them-_

Alistair sat bolt upright in his too-comfortable bed, the too-soft sheets soaked through with sweat, the dying echo of a scream on his too-dry lips. His guards have long ago learnt to demarcate his night terrors from true distress, but he still doesn't envy them having to listen to their king scream himself awake on a thrice-weekly basis-less often in recent weeks, but still disturbing, nonetheless. And his queen, how she must have worried over him. "I'm sorry, Annie," he slurred, still only half awake, and he pawed apologetically at her spot beside him, only to have his palm land flat in the depression her body had worn into the mattress, warmed only by his own thrashing. The spot had lain cool for more than a year, now, and suddenly a memory cut through the ague of his nightmare, of the last time he had seen her there, appearing for all the world in peaceful slumber, finally beyond the agony no healer had been able to expunge. "I'm so, so sorry," he breathed, closing his eyes against the tears that welled there, for the flickering visions of his nightmare were slightly more welcome than the paltry reality he had woken up to.

Theirs had been a political marriage, of course, guided in its early months by the deft influence of Leliana, who'd been Alistair's lover and who, by some confluence of luck and skill, became one of Anora's dearest friends. When Leliana's duty drew her to Val Royeaux, she left the King and Queen of Ferelden in a state of companionship that slowly grew into an unlikely kind of love, built on respect and admiration before affection and infatuation-though those aspects were hardly absent, once the two got past the awkwardness of actually having fallen in love with one another. That love saw them through the years of governance, the small miscalculations and the unreasonable defiance of even smaller nobles who chafed under the peace Alistair and his friends had bought them with blood, the whispers of discontent over the Wardens' overreach and the continued vacancy of the royal nursery. Anora and Alistair held strong through it all, each keeping the other's council, respectful even where they disagreed. They made an excellent team, in politics as in life, and by rights they should have done so for years yet; it was funny to think, but Alistair was supposed to be the one to waste away, or rather to disappear one night, after the years had turned his beard grey and his ears became attuned to the song of the Old Gods.

Instead he had to watch Anora, that brave and strong woman, fall to a wasting sickness the healers could only delay for so long. Not long after she returned to the Maker's side, Alistair's dreams began bringing him back to Denerim under siege, and he thought he might go mad with despair. But there was a country to run, and no man or woman more fitting to run it than the scion of Calenhad; so, even as a part of him wanted little more than to chase his dreams all the way into the Deep Roads, Alistair kept his head and his crown, heavy though both grew in his grief.

Even now, regret and remorse drove him to discount the disquiet he felt in his heart following his latest nightmare, and he tried to settle back into the bed to salvage a few more hours' sleep before the business of the country dragged him back out of it once more. But his heart began to pound strongly in his chest as he lay there, his blood twitching oddly in his veins until he couldn't ignore it-until he couldn't breathe, couldn't hold back strangled grasps, couldn't draw in enough air to call for help. The world went black-even in the dimness of his bedchamber, there should have been _some_ light to see by, but he could not, and the writhing beneath his skin only increased. _Oh, Maker_ , he thought to himself, as he felt blood and bile rising at the back of his throat. _I...I'm not-_

His vision returned with all of the suddenness it had fled him, and he lay paralysed, witness to the black ichor of his own heart passing from his mouth and nose, lifting to float in the air above him as though conjured by a blood mage. He would have screamed if he could have done, and though he racked his brain for his dormant templar training, the King of Ferelden was impotent to halt this magical assault. It could mean any number of things-had the wards about the palace failed? Had his own court mage, Horace, been murdered by a fanatic rueing the crown's cooperation with the Inquisition? Had the man himself betrayed him? Eventually, despite his paralysis, Alistair's continued survival-not to mention his ability to think-began eliminating possibilities, until none remained that he could comprehend. When the last of the black blood lifted from his lips, it joined the mass above him. Suddenly he could breathe again, though he lay transfixed by the blood that had been drawn out of him. It formed into a sphere, a solid ball of darkness as total as any nook of the Deep Roads, and it began to boil away, bubbling and roiling from some inner flame that gave off no smoke or sound, but worked all the same to reduce the foulness until it disappeared.

When it was gone, Alistair tried to move his arm, and found that he could do so; indeed, it was lighter than it had felt in years, and when he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, the blood left there smeared crimson against his flesh, bright and vivid even in the night's shadow. _That_ had not happened-blood the colour blood was _supposed_ to be-since a handful of months after his Joining. And despite the trauma of the experience, he found himself not only alive, but positively _hopeful_ , as though a great anvil, weighing down his heart for too many years, had finally been toppled over. He was exhausted, yes, but somehow he felt free. And then he realised that _the song had gone_. The song whose subtle tunes he'd first heard whispered the night of his Joining, the song that had begun to intrude on his thoughts even during the day since Anora's passing. It had not simply receded to the underbelly of his awareness, either; it was _gone_ , well and truly absent, and he could not even remember the notes.

For the first time in more than a year, when Alistair fell asleep, he did so without fear of what his dreams might bring. In the morning, he roused himself to a world a half-shade brighter than the one he'd bid goodnight, and he spent the next several days in the odd position of attempting to hide his improved outlook from his councillors and confidantes; his mourning had given him a more reserved mien than had been his wont, and this miracle, the unaccountable removal of the curse in his blood, gave buoyancy to his boyish heart in a way that he did not quite trust to endure-despite the fact that his blood ran red instead of black, and that he might well live to ninety and die in his bed in good humour, he could not afford to let the news slip until he could confirm it...such speculation could destabilise the court, and if he still cared at all for Anora, he owed more to her memory than that. And none of it-not the new lease on life, nor the political considerations-changed the fact that he was _still_ in mourning, and he could sense the reservoir of his grief lingering in the back of his heart, waiting to catch him unawares. It had done so before, after allowing him a day or an hour or a fleeting moment of relative quiescence, only to flood his heart with a sadness that could not be begged nor bartered away.

So he was wary, despite the lightness in his flesh and the cessation of the constant hunger that had gnawed at his belly every waking moment since he had taken the cup, all those years ago. On the fifth night after the event, he sat up late in his study, scribbling a letter in a sloppy hand, musing over his changed circumstances. The letter was addressed to Anora and was destined for the fire; a great part of their romance had been in shared missives, begun at first when duties led them apart for stretches of days, eventually becoming a habit even when they could rely on sleeping in the same bed. More than once they had both sat in this very study at their desks, writing to one another in silence, trading their thoughts and feelings on vellum. It was an indulgence, to be sure, but a relatively harmless one.

The first letter he put to parchment without the hope of a reply was the most difficult of his life, and the missives since had only grown marginally easier; sometimes he let weeks turn into months before he returned to this table with a mind to send Anora another letter. He did so this night with his grieving heart lightened by an altogether different kind of loss; he was not certain he deserved the clemency he'd received, and he was not at _all_ certain how it had been done, but he could not help but share this news with his queen.

He was near to the bottom of the vellum when a strange voice sounded from the study's entryway, catching him off his guard and causing him to break his pen against the table. "What are you writing?" The voice asked him, sounding innocently curious, of a tone and calibre he had not properly heard in far too long. When he turned to regard whomever the voice belonged to, he saw a young lady-a girl, really-in the tanned leathers of a ranger, with a long fall of raven hair loosely gathered at the base of her neck, her face open, wise beyond the dozen years he guessed she'd seen.

Questions vied for dominance in his mind as he absent-mindedly wiped the ink from his fingers onto his trousers, which stained readily, but did little to clean his flesh. "And who might you be?" won the contest, as opposed to _How did you slip my guard_ or _Did you know that thieves who announce themselves don't tend to be very successful_.

"I asked you first," the girl told him, reasonably, her lips curling into a cherub's smirk. "Fair's fair; give an answer to get an answer."

Alistair was reminded, then, of the madman he and his companions (or, rather, Athadra and _her_ companions, of which he'd been a member in good standing) confronted in the Brecilian Forest during the Fifth Blight; the old man had told them something oddly similar, when they needed his assistance. "Fair's fair," the monarch conceded, in the present, though he smirked for his own at the memory. "I'm writing a letter to my wife, in fact." This girl-thief or not-did not deserve to be burdened with the full measure of the truth.

Her smile fell, her expression growing serious. "Is she very far away?"

His own smile tightened, as the fingers of melancholy flexed about the tendrils of his heart, still distant...but not absent. "An answer for an answer," he reminded her.

Her own logic rebounded apparently made her giggle. "Fair's fair," she told him. "I'm called Kiera."

"That's a Chasind name," the king remarked, the thought passing his lips as soon as it crossed his mind. "Are your family from the Korcari Wilds?" She lacked the ochre markings of the folk, as well as the tongue, but such could be explained by having grown up as a refugee from the Blight.

"My mother was," Kiera explained. "I don't think my father was, though."

Something tickled at the back of Alistair's mind, a notion too diffuse even to be properly termed a thought, but he could not summon it to proper form. "Please, sit," he invited the girl, gesturing to a pair of chairs by the study's crackling fireplace. "Are you hungry or thirsty, Kiera?" He asked, when she had done so, and he moved to join her when she shook her head. "Now, why have you come to bother an old man at his writing desk in the middle of the night?" He wondered, once he'd sat down across from her.

The girl evidently forgot their answer-trading game, or else she sensed she would not get a proper answer from her last question, because she replied without commenting on it. "I wanted to see if I could get past the wards," she said, as though it were no more a challenge-or transgression-than climbing down a well.

Alistair's eyes narrowed and he concentrated, summoning old lessons he hadn't had cause to use in years, and there it was-a faint whisper of magic, kissing his nerves with a subtly different rhythm than the spellwork laced through the stones. Part of him-the part that had given up his sword but begrudgingly, the part that envied his younger soldiers their youth-was taken with an excited sort of fear. The rest of him was taken with a far more reasonable sort of fear, that if a girl of ten or twelve could skip through Horace's wards, she could probably put up a fight even against the King of Ferelden, and if she were an assassin, chances were at least even that he would not live to morning. Yet she could have taken him unawares as he wrote, which would have entailed the best chance of success, so it didn't stand to reason that he should be _too_ frightened. (Unless she was truly confident she didn't _need_ the element of surprise, in which case his being frightened would likely not help matters, regardless.) So he merely shrugged, gesturing to the room at large. "Well, it looks like you've succeeded, Kiera with the mother from the Korcari Wilds and the father from...probably not there."

"I did!" Kiera enthused, grinning in obvious pride. "Mother said to wait until she was sure she could do it without bringing the guards," she said, her face falling. "...I just wanted to see if I could. I didn't mean for you to see me." Now she began to look concerned; it was not a child's concern of a wrothful parent, but a far more sympathetic kind. "I shouldn't stay long-if Mother notes my absence, she'll be more like to try and find me here, which might get her into trouble with the guards."

The girl was obviously bright-brighter than some of the guards she seemed so worried about on her mother's behalf, at any rate-and though she didn't _seem_ interested in malefaction, that didn't mean she wasn't dangerous. It wasn't at all clear whether the danger was greater or lesser if she simply disappeared, and so Alistair judged it prudent to try and coax her to stay, at least until he could nail down her-or her mother's-motives. "You're not worried about getting caught on the way out?" He mused, scratching his bearded jaw reflectively. "I'd think Horace wouldn't have made it any easier to leave than to get in in the first place."

A flicker of a smile returned to the girl's face. "He didn't," she agreed. "But the wards let _you_ through both ways, so they'll let me out, just as sure as they let me in."

"But that's different," Alistair pointed out. "I'm _supposed_ to be able to cross them without incident; strange girls with mothers from the Wilds are supposed to be kept out," he observed, though he couldn't help but be infected by her grin.

"You and your wife, aye," Kiera said. "You can pass the wards because your blood's keyed into them."

Mention of Anora had his heartstrings quivering again, and he looked into the fire, perhaps foolishly. "Indeed," he allowed, recalling his and Anora's slight unease at the pinpricks of their blood used to seal the doors and windows; it had been less blood than Horace had given over to his own phylactery, but it had still given them pause. In the end, it had been Alistair's hubris and his trust in Horace that had allowed them such personal protection-not that it had been sufficient, these years later, to keep out the half-Chasind girl. "Though my wife won't be passing through the wards any time soon," he allowed, returning his attention to Kiera. "So that means it's just me."

"Just you," the girl agreed, after a handful of heartbeats. "And anyone with your blood." She wasn't smiling, then.

"I suppose," Alistair conceded, smirking. "But that'd mean you got your hands on my blood somehow," he observed, enjoying a shallow sort of cunning. "I think I'd remember giving a smart little girl a bit of my blood...unless you wiped my memory after I did."

Kiera giggled. "That's not the reason," she said, not _quite_ a scold. "Is there not a better reason you can think of for how your blood got in my hands?"

The cadence of her words was familiar, somehow, even though her voice was too high and her years too few to sound as deeply cunning as she did. He looked at her face, really _looked_ , and he couldn't shake that odd sense of familiarity, almost _déjà vu_ , that welled up in him when he looked into her golden eyes. "What is your mother's name, Kiera?"

"She's called Morrigan," the girl said, each syllable like another blow to the sternum.

That was what he'd feared-and hoped-she would say. Part of him had known from the first words out of her mouth, but it had taken him until this moment to accept it. "And that makes me…"

"Her father, yes," came another voice, from the other side of the study. It was a voice he hadn't heard in so many years that he didn't trust himself to turn, but when he did so, he saw Morrigan as only she could have been; her hair was still as black as a raven's wing, her eyes kholed and skin fair, but the passing time had given her a wariness that the arrogance of her youth had masked. "I see the years have not blessed your tongue with wit," she observed.

If there had been any doubts as to whether the interloper were an imposter, her biting remark allayed them; though it had been an insult, he found himself grinning. "There haven't been enough years to let me forget that the last time I saw you, you said it was to be the _last_ time I saw you," he recalled. "Not that I'm complaining, mind," he hastened to add, his heart lightening with each beat as the reality sunk in.

For her part, Morrigan appeared chagrinned. "Yes, well, if there is one thing Flemeth has taught me, 'tis that we cannot stake our comfort on guarantees." She threw her gaze to the girl opposite him, who looked pensively contrite, and who, it surprised and amazed him to understand, was his daughter. "Please return to camp; we shall discuss your interpretation of my admonitions later tonight."

Kiera regarded her mother with all seriousness, as though long used to the weight of consequence for her choices. "I will be there, Mother," she vowed, before she took to her feet and offered Alistair a smile. "Until next time."

"I look forward to it," Alistair said, and he did. He watched the girl melt from the room like dawn's final shadow, and when she'd gone, he couldn't help but smile at Morrigan, who still stood in the middle of the room. "I'd wondered about the particulars of that little ritual you and Athadra talked me into, before the battle."

Though his tone was light, lighter perhaps than it had been since the onset of his grief, Morrigan flinched as though his words were weapons crudely honed and recklessly wielded. She glanced toward the bedchamber, the direction her- _their_ -child had used to make her exit, and her face set with a grimace when her eyes returned. "Athadra is dead," she said, in a hoarse whisper almost beneath the king's hearing.

All at once, the tentative elation he had subtly entertained at the night's revelations evaporated, as those three words rose like a tide along the shoreline of his mind. "Dead," he repeated, his voice and face both flattening. He wasn't shocked, precisely-one could not have known Athadra for more than an hour and have expected her to make old bones-but still, the news was sobering. His oldest friend had finally met her match. The question of how was on his tongue when he looked up at Morrigan, and he saw her face shadowed by a pall of anguish that he could recognise from having felt the mask from the inside. The threat of tears crinkled at the corners of her eyes, and her breath shuddered, though she hardly made a sound.

He rose from his chair without a word, and she did not strike him down when he folded her into his arms and rested his chin upon the crown of her head; instead she stiffened for the sum of three heartbeats before she collapsed into his embrace, and he made sure to keep his grip supple as the silent sobs rose to the surface of her frame. He had loved Athadra as a sister, as a warrior, as a friend; the witch in his arms had loved her in an altogether different way, and though fate and their own stubbornness in hewing to it kept the two of them apart far longer than either woman would have liked, he did not begrudge the keen edge of her loss. "Let it out," he counseled, as much to say something as to offer proper advice. "Just let it out."

Her sobs turned into strangled cries against his tunic, and he kept his feet firm upon the floor to anchor her; he'd had nothing and no one but himself in the wake of Anora's death, and he knew how difficult he still found the solitude of grief. If he could provide some comfort to another pained soul, perhaps he could reclaim a piece of his own in the process. He patted her shoulders and took deep, calming breaths, remarking to himself how slight she truly was-she always loomed large in his memory, her physical stature bolstered by her magical prowess and her acerbic nature. But there was no shield against this kind of hurt, no armour or strength either mental or physical that could divert the force of this blow. Only patience could win out against this assault, and even that was hardly guaranteed. "Breathe," he reminded her, once she'd wept herself dry, still clinging to him like a raft in the midst of a flood. "Just breathe, Morrigan."


	3. Uninvited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the eve of the Inquisition's final push into the Arbor Wilds, two old friends have a reckoning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to coffee_maker for her excellent beta-reading skills and indefatigable support! This drab is based on an even shorter sketch I wrote for my tumblr a couple of years ago; I've fleshed it out a bit and it's finally found a home in Apocrypha. Hope you like it!

“I did not bid you enter,” said the Witch of the Wilds, without turning from her tome. It had much she would need to learn, and quickly, if she was to keep herself and her child safe from her mother. She could not afford to be swayed from its study, not even by the sentiments borne of and by the one who crossed her threshold. 

 

“Been a long time since I bothered to knock on somebody's door,” said the intruder, that tumbledown rockslide of a voice penetrating into the very depths of Morrigan’s soul, reaching places she’d thought long since withered and dead; places she had once considered as foreign as the unknown lands beyond the eastern sea. The intruder’s magical aura, only half-remembered and wrought anew by arts even Morrigan could not countenance, did not strike her nearly so deeply as that voice. “You’re still here,” observed the interloper, after a moment passed without reply, unable to conceal the merest edge of sarcastic surprise.

 

“I am.” ‘Twas the truth, and merited no further exposition.

 

The intruder stepped further into the room, still without invitation, but only far enough to close the door and settle back against it. “I were afraid I’d not see you again.” This time the words were delivered without emotion, as though that horrible brand which marred her forehead was still potent, had still sequestered her spirit. The monotone felt  _ wrong _ , coming from the same throat which had screamed itself to scar tissue over the course of years; the throat which had been the conduit of immense pain, passion, and not a little pleasure.

 

The Witch of the Wilds turned the page of her bound volume, her finger tracing over the ancient script, but her pulse drowned out the voice of comprehension in her mind and she found she could not keep the string of words coherent in her thoughts, too taken were they with memories, and with regrets. The intruder did not budge, even after several moments of unbroached silence. “How’s Kiera?” The woman finally asked, a question whose answer she had no right to possess.

 

“Secure,” said Morrigan. “Such is all you need to know.”  _ More than _ , she should have added, but did not. Could not. The text around her fingers seemed to smear, and she closed her eyes against the tears which begged leave to stain her cheeks.

 

Another moment passed; another eon. “You should know,” said the interloper, tentatively, while taking an audible step forward from the door, “I forg—”

 

“Don't,” said Morrigan, the cacophony of her thoughts resolving to clarity within a subtle heartbeat. “Do not offer me that.” Her reply was fine as a feline’s breath, yet it was enough to arrest the other woman’s tongue, along with her feet. The Witch of the Wilds did not have a heart, not truly; certainly not  _ this _ heart, that quavered so weakly in her chest, that nailed her down to the chair, that kept her from turning around and facing her accuser. “If there is but one thing in this cruel world I know I could not survive, ‘tis your forgiveness.”

 

A raven’s wingspan of breaths passed, before the interloper mustered that graveline voice to sonorence once again. “Then...I've missed you,” she insisted, not returning to the door, but neither approaching. Still, the Witch of the Wilds remained resolute, unwilling to give the other woman the satisfaction of seeing the tears that now pooled in the corners of her eyes like dewdrops in the misty morn. “And had I time’s wheel to spin again,” her tormenter continued, with some glimmer of that once-unquenchable fire trickling into her tones, “I’d have spun it another way. Made good on my threat to track you after the Blight; built a home with room enough for the three of us, if you'd have had me; forsworn my lust for whiskey and war.” The vows tripped from her lips like newborn fawns, tentative and frightened, and yet full of such promise. 

 

The tears that had so forebodingly pooled at Morrigan’s cheekbones now spilt freely, scant flashes of the lives they might have led passing over the backs of her eyelids. There would have been a library, and an herb garden, and a training yard; there would have been ravens and foxes and all manner of wild creatures, and even, perhaps, an accursed mabari hound. It would have been magical, in myriad ways. 

 

It would have been worth the risk. 

 

“But we cannot turn back the wheel,” Morrigan admitted, a bitter burn weaving through her throat. “We may only ride it where we’ve set it off to go.”

 

“Aye,” the other woman acknowledged. “Yet occasionally our paths afford us a chance to turn...to take a slightly different route to our destination, and perhaps, once or twice, revisit old friends.”

 

The Witch of the Wilds closed her book, no longer able even to pretend to partake of the wisdom it contained, and she slowly rose from her seat, laying her palms flat against the table at which she'd hitherto studied so labouriously. “If I had my wheel to spin again, I never would have left the Korcari Wilds; never allowed myself to...to be so beguiled,” she breathed, her tongue hardly tensing around her words, but she knew her uninvited guest would hear every husked syllable. “Yet that does not mean that every aspect of me is unhappy that the wheel cannot be unwound,” she allowed, even more faintly. “And I have missed you, too.”

 

That last, wrenching confession was more difficult than any spell she'd ever cast, and, like the more intricate magics she'd practiced, its utterance left her both drained and filled with a sort of yearning to see how far she could push her next incantation. She stood there, leaning against her rough-hewn table, weeping silently over the volume which may well hold the ultimate salvation for herself and her daughter, unable to make herself turn to face her accursed intruder, and yet just as unable to send her away.

 

“I can go, if that's what you want,” the invading woman offered, after another interval of strained silence; the down-soft words were malformed in her steel-hard throat, such consideration so rarely given as to be voiced in an alien tongue, somehow even stranger than the spiritless notes she had produced a few moments past. Another flock of breaths took flight, just as pregnant with implication as Morrigan had once been with Kiera, years before. “I'll go,” said the not-so-strange woman, so lightly that her voice resembled the scholar she might once have been, rather than the roughened warrior that fate had bid her become. 

 

A limped step sounded, and a paw at the door, and Morrigan’s heart-that-wasn't hammered madly in her chest. “Athadra,” she breathed, tasting the woman's name on her lips for the first time in too many years. “Don't.”

 

The next few heartbeats passed in an eternity, like a spider swimming through honey, the weakness in Morrigan’s heart twisting into an unexpected strength in her limbs which had her bearing up from her desk with a brute’s force.

 

The elven woman was still a marvel to look upon, weathered as she'd been by the years and the manifold tribulations which they'd visited upon her almost entirely in Morrigan’s absence. The room's single candle played shadows over Athadra’s scars, and the cloth which covered the most offensive of them. She looked so unutterably vulnerable, standing there in her sundered Chantry robes, arms hanging limply at her sides, her one remaining eye shining with unshed tears of its own. Not weak---never that, not even when she'd truly been Tranquil in Lambert van Reeves’ thrall---but  _ open _ , in that same way that had at first drawn Morrigan’s curiosity, and thence her affection, so many years before. 

 

“Beautiful,” they both intoned, as one, and for once the proclamation brought a hint of colour to Athadra's dusty cheek. Morrigan’s heart lodged into her throat, choking off her supply of words, but the newfound strength in her limbs carried her across the floor and into the other woman's arms. Otherworldly power pulsed just beneath the elf’s skin, but she was gentle in her embrace; far gentler than Morrigan had any right to expect, given everything that had passed between them, and everything that hadn't. 

 

The elf’s lips were rough, but her kiss was soft, and where once Morrigan’s nostrils would have been filled with woodsmoke and saddle oil and the copper tang of blood, now there was earth and incense and the static miasma of the Fade about the other woman. Even so, Athadra felt solid under the witch's arms, and she could feel the chords of muscle shift beneath those Chantry robes as Athadra leant up into their too-long-delayed kiss. Though taller, Morrigan had no illusions as to the parity of their physical prowess, despite the dreadful captivity and the grievous injuries to body and spirit that Athadra had suffered before and since her captivity in the White Spire. The fact of those injuries made the elf’s careful touch all the more remarkable, for Athadra responded to every shift and caress in kind without going a hair's breadth further, without asserting her will through the strength of her flesh. 

 

“I love you,” Athadra panted, when their lips finally parted. A single tear stalked down the side of her face, blazing a salty trail across her cheek and over her jaw, and when next she spoke, her voice was rasped as though on a file. “Fuck the gods and ‘spawn and the petty men who fear them both. Fuck them all, and fuck that big, ugly dragon I'll have to bring down.” Her eye closed, and another tear coursed down the path its predecessor had laid, and the implications of her words resolved in Morrigan’s mind like a half-remembered girlhood song---hazy at first, and then as clear as polished glass. 

 

“You mean to die.” ‘Twasn’t a question, the fact as certain as the yearning twist that coursed through Morrigan’s belly upon the other's free admission of her feelings. The world blurred anew with a fresh well of tears, and Morrigan felt her own strength surge yet again as she coiled her embrace all the more tightly around the shorter woman. 

 

This time Athadra did not respond in kind, and it was a wise thing, too, for the elf had strength enough to rend Morrigan in twain. She did support the taller witch as the human sank down to her knees, offering her shoulder to soak up the silent tears which Morrigan could not keep from shedding. “I don't want to,” the elf whispered, pressing a featherlight kiss to the side of Morrigan’s head, “but I can't let someone else take the blow, and I'll not make another bargain with your mother.”

 

Kneeling like this inverted the difference in their heights, so that Morrigan felt small in her elven lover's embrace. “I have been selfish, and all the more foolish to feel this despair over it,” she insisted, delivering her whispered lament to Athadra’s collarbone. “I have watched you die and I've been instrumental in your resurrection.”

 

“For which I do not blame you,” Athadra replied, running a soothing hand up Morrigan’s spine, and leaving her feeling all the more foolish that  _ she  _ should be getting consoled by one so soon to face certain death. 

 

She did not have another spell, another trick up her sleeve to offer the hero a way to fight another day. Any magicks she might have employed to that end, even assuming Athadra were willing to entertain them, would have been far too risky, and were certain to come at too high a cost to be worth those risks. “Please,” Morrigan breathed, unable to silence the desire to maintain her lover's grip. “Do not leave me alone tonight.

 

Athadra shifted, moving her hands to Morrigan’s shoulders and drawing back so that she might look upon her lover's tearstained face. The elf smiled, slowly, a faint glimmer of hope breaking through the melancholy she wore so well. “I were hoping you'd ask me that,” she admitted, and Morrigan found herself drawing in to deliver her reply via yet another gentle kiss, which Athadra met with the tender passion she had nursed over so many lonely years since the last night they had dared to spend in one another's company. 


End file.
